Automation in the Age of Digital Transformation

Organizations of all types and sizes are currently enamored with (or plagued) by a new IT buzzword –Digital Transformation. The cloud, mobile and social network era is indeed affecting the way organizations run their business. Big data and the Internet of

Things (IoT) also have firms investing wildly to keep up, or scratching their heads trying to figure out what to do.
In this webinar Carl Lehmann, Hybrid IT analyst at 451 Research will discuss digital transformation from both business and technical perspectives by:

• Describing digital transformation and how it is used to create competitive advantage
• Discussing why and how enterprises are pursuing such initiatives
• Identifying the critical technology needed for execution
• Revealing how workflow automation accelerates new ways of doing business

Attendees will learn how to define and structure digital transformation initiatives unique to their firms and how best to make use of workflow automation for IT and business transformation.

The DevOps revolution continues to advance – and security must advance with it. Too often, however, approaches to application security remain stuck in the past. Throwing security assessment results over the fence to developers never really worked, and it certainly won’t survive the transition to DevOps and CI/CD, where agile techniques and automation set a demanding pace.

In this webinar, Scott Crawford, Research Director of Information Security with 451 Research, and Meera Subbarao with Synopsys, will highlight:

•The many points of opportunity DevOps present to engage in real collaboration across security, development and operations teams (it’s not just about testing!)
•How DevOps introduces opportunities to “shift left” with the security investment, and reduce the cost impact of security remediation and response
•Where and how security efforts can capitalize on automation and integration with DevOps toolsets
•Sourcing expertise: Security and development both require specialized expertise. Security in DevOps requires a unique mix of both. How can you find it?

Transactional applications and high speed analytics have previously been reserved for in memory applications but recent advancements in solid state technology and active data infrastructure have delivered performance that remove I/O wait times that are prevalent with the current generation of all flash arrays. Attend this webinar to learn more about how Vexata delivers solutions that unlock application performance to deliver strategic business outcomes.

Can government institutions use modern tools and technologies to become more flexible and responsive to their constituents? What should they be looking at, and how should they adapt to the challenges of data security, privacy, and reliance on legacy systems? Digital transformation is an ambitious project for any organization; government decision-makers are hoping it will provide a path to broader citizen engagement, empowered employees, and new digital infrastructures that will provide better access to data and services.

In this webinar we will discuss the results of a survey on the challenges and imperatives of digital transformation, including the perspectives of government managers on their technology and operational challenges and expectations.

IT environments have gotten markedly faster, helped by technologies such as public and private clouds, and automation tools. As a result, maintaining compliance with regulations such as PCI, HIPAA, SOC2, etc has become much more difficult if you continue to use old-style compliance thinking and tools. In this webinar, you’ll learn the friction points caused by old tools and the new best practices that will allow you to maintain compliance in any environment, no matter how fast-paced.

There are a lot of benefits to running databases on cloud infrastructure – reduced costs, fewer capital expenses and better agility. It’s easier, faster and less expensive to deploy and/or scale databases on cloud infrastructure. However, there are important considerations to understand when it comes to databases in the cloud, public or private.

MariaDB TX (OLTP) and MariaDB AX (OLAP) are great database solutions for cloud infrastructure. In fact, according to the most recent OpenStack User Survey (April 2017), MariaDB is the most widely deployed database on OpenStack.

In this webinar, MariaDB and 451 Research will discuss why companies are moving to cloud infrastructure, what you need to know in order to be successful and why MariaDB database solutions are a great fit for the cloud.

Join us to learn about:

•The benefits of cloud infrastructure
•Key considerations before moving to the cloud
•Getting started on AWS and Microsoft Azure

Banks, credit unions and insurance companies may have differing business models, but they all have a common goal: better conversion and retention rates.

Fortunately, better customer onboarding usually translates to better conversion and retention. For this reason, organizations continue to invest in digital technologies to streamline operations and eliminate time-consuming online interactions in areas such as new account opening, loan origination and policy applications.

Those first information-intensive interactions, of course, are the most critical: you usually only get once chance to win a new customer’s business. But winning is only part of the equation. What if you could win—and wow—customers from those first moments and keep them engaged throughout the onboarding process?

Mark your calendars for this upcoming webinar, where industry experts will share six best practices to help your organization win and wow customers:

DNS plays a central role in all online services but for many enterprises, DNS is inhibiting efforts to modernize infrastructure and boost online performance. In this webinar, Jennifer Clark from the 451 Group and Jonathan Sullivan, co-founder of NS1 discuss the role of DNS in how applications are deployed and delivered. Learn the results of the latest 451 research and discover how a modern, intelligent DNS delivers positive business results for online enterprises. Topics include:
1.How the application deployment landscape is changing: DevOps, automation, infrastructure as code.
2.Application performance and new techniques for getting more value at less cost from your cloud, CDN and network providers.
3.How enterprises are leveraging intelligent DNS to gain better results from their top IT initiatives.

Join 451 Research and CenturyLink on the 20th September at 3:00pm UK time, 4:00pm CET, to discuss how enterprises are choosing and deploying digital transformation initiatives for business gain. This webinar will focus on the strategies and actions impacting the European market.

Organisations of all sizes and in every sector are busy redefining their IT priorities for a digital future, identifying the goals of enhanced customer experience, operational efficiency, business agility and improved risk management as four key pillars for their digital transformation strategies.

Digital transformation can play out differently depending on a company’s maturity, the vertical sector in which it operates, its employees, its infrastructure, and its ability to innovate. Knowing where to start, and how to maintain momentum is critical.

Join 451 Research and CenturyLink to learn how European enterprises are making assured first steps, and discover the following:

- Understand how companies with more progressive digital transformation strategies are prioritising their efforts for competitive differentiation, changing the nature of their business with innovative technologies, and making service provider choices to accelerate results.

- Gain insights and recommendations from a major survey of the IT priorities of enterprises in Europe.

- Identify the key shifts in business context that will continue to shape digitisation efforts, and how these need to be reflected in a digital transformation roadmap for IT organisations.

Forget Oracle, IBM or any of the other big-name, publicly traded acquirers that – until now --have always set the tone in the tech M&A market. If a tech deal printed in 2017, the buyer is more likely a private equity firm than any of the well-known serial acquirers on the US stock market. This is the first time in the history of the multibillion-dollar tech M&A market that financial acquirers have been busier than these strategic acquirers. To understand how the ever-growing influence of buyout shops is reshaping the tech industry, join 451 Research for an hour-long webinar on Thursday, Sept. 7 2017.

The cloud promises to enable organisations to be more flexible, agile and responsive to the needs of their business and the demands of customer and partners. As physical infrastructure has become invisible to end-users, the role of service providers and channel partners has changed. Faced with public and private options, many firms are taking a XaaS approach, embracing the best of both private and public worlds - implementing hybrid architectures to deliver on-demand access to compute resources, capacity, and services, while also providing greater levels of control, security, and visibility of data and applications. In this webinar, Rory Duncan, Research Director with 451 Research will outline the opportunities for Service Providers and channel partners delivering cloud services, examining topics such as support, managed services, data protection and data sovereignty for facilitating cloud consumption.

We’ve been working through the impacts of software-defined networking for a number of years. The technologies that have reached the market today have matured considerably from the early implementations and there are tremendous opportunities that SDN has created. What were once model T’s are now a lot faster and a bit more furious.

Those changes have also opened some gaps in understanding and management that can create operational issues and security concerns. SD-WAN’s are seeing a lot of deployment and the orchestration possibilities of virtual networks in software-defined infrastructures (SDI) are powerful.

This session will dig into the implications of all of this new performance and look at ways to ensure that your network doesn’t wind up in the ditch. There’s a lot of good work to be done, but it’s important to understand how to master all of that power.

Learn how to instantly clone and recover very large databases in the data center or in the cloud.

The digital economy is driving massive volumes of information into databases. Database Administrators (DBAs) are now struggling to balance operational needs such as performance and availability with the needs of their development teams who want more database copies and the current copies to be refreshed faster. These challenges also inhibit innovation and make it difficult for DBAs to consider new offerings such as self-service database provisioning, cloud integration and instant database recovery solutions. In this webinar learn how to instantly clone and recover very large databases in the data center or in the cloud.

As cloud continues to erase the network perimeter, it’s more important than ever to align IT infrastructure to track more closely to the businesses it serves.

As a result, gateway technology choices and investments need to fit the cloud model and fit in terms of security use case, value, and real-world business requirements.

Join Dan Cummins, analyst with 451 Research and Tim Chiu, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Symantec, for an informative webinar on August 2 to hear a discussion of network security today.

Agenda:

- Discussion on the increased dependence on HTTP and HTTPS

- The limitations of Firewalls in the web and cloud world

The increasing critical need for web gateways, both on premise and in the cloud, for achieving:

- Access governance for users and devices

- Verifiable protection against advanced attack methods

- Agile risk management and measurable return on investment.

Important opportunities are at hand right now to integrate network and cloud-based approaches to achieve coordinated and robust anti-malware, privacy, policy and connectivity capabilities, while continuing on a path to flexible, software-defined infrastructure.

The meteoric rise of software is putting pressure on development teams to iterate faster. It’s no surprise that this trend has resulted in the adoption of new tools and more agile practices, such as DevOps, the impact of which has been to push testing left. Development and DevOps teams are now building in testing earlier in the development cycle, helping to speed delivery of new releases for maximum competitive advantage.

This new methodology also is shaking up the relationship between testing teams and development teams. In some cases, developers might take on some QA functions, while the QA teams serve as consultants. A free web seminar on August 1st will explore these topics in-depth with expert advice from Nancy Gohring, 451 Research Senior Analyst for Application and Infrastructure Performance, and Dharminder Dewan, Agile QA Manager for Infostretch.

Join this web seminar to learn how to:

•Overcome common quality challenges that are faced by most developers
•Apply “Shift Left” DevOps best practices to achieve the highest quality and fastest time to market
•Improve group dynamics across DevOps teams to optimize the development life cycle for continuous delivery of quality software at speed.

Andy Lawrence, Research VP at 451 Research & Ulrich Schälling, Head of Business Line Networks at FNT Software

The competitive advantage of MTDC and hosting providers will be determined by their ability to become a provider of services - not just iron. As space and power have been commoditized, being able to differentiate with new business and financial models and new products will mean the difference between success and failure. To succeed in this market, these companies need to provide the right prod-ucts and services to their customers. To compete effectively in today’s hyper-competitive market, they must offer customers new and innovative network connections and connectivity services. To support this strategy the infrastructure management team and network operations managers need to emphasize on standardized infrastructures, efficient change processes and secure maintenance and operation

IT planners have far more options as to where to run their workloads than ever before. On-premises data centers, co-location facilities and managed services providers are now joined by hybrid multi-clouds – a combination of Software-, Infrastructure- and Platform-as-a-Service (SaaS, IaaS, and PaaS) execution venues. All have unique operational, performance and economic characteristics that need to be considered when deploying workloads.

In this Webinar Carl Lehmann, Principal Analyst with 451 Research, and Don Davis, Technology Director for Iron Mountain’s Data Center business will discuss how industry leading enterprises determine the best execution venues for their workloads by addressing:

•The market and technology trends that influence workload, data center and cloud strategy
•How to evaluate the characteristics of various workloads and execution venues
•How to manage workloads across on-premises and off-premises ecosystems
Attendees will learn how to formulate an IT strategy that can be used to guide the decision criteria needed for placing workloads on their best execution venues, and enable the migration and ongoing management of workloads across a hybrid multi-cloud enterprise architecture.

Serverless is more than just hype; it has the potential to revolutionize the way we develop, build and operate applications in the cloud. Understanding the economics of serverless technology is vital to understanding its role in the world and its longer-term potential to disrupt the industry. In this webinar, we review these economics, pit the TCO of serverless against traditional virtual machines and containers, and compare pricing across the big four providers, namely AWS, Google, IBM and Microsoft.

Duane Kuroda, Group Manager of Adance Tech at Proofpoint. Eric Ogren, Senior Analyst at 451 Research

Why does it take six months to a year to build out most security orchestration and automation solutions? In contrast, criminals are constantly innovating with new tools and techniques, allowing them to release more than 300,000 new malware samples every day. Leap past alert fatigue and a security skills shortage with tips and best practices to level-up your incident response game.

Join Eric Ogren and Duane Kuroda in this webinar to discuss how incident response challenges are being met using Proofpoint’s Incident Response Orchestration and Automation solution, Threat Response.

Is this webinar, you’ll learn about:

* Potential traps and pitfalls in orchestration and automation
* Tips for simplifying and accelerating your IR processes
* How organizations are setting up, launching and benefiting from our IR solution in one day or less

IT security teams are busier than ever, with executives and board members taking a newfound interest thanks to headline-level breaches. With all this scrutiny, validating whether security controls are actually working is key.

Red teams, white-hat external penetration testers, and internal scanners can provide some assurance, but with attacks and successful breaches continuing to increase, IT must find new ways to stay out of the headlines. If current market spend is any indicator, many enterprises are simply throwing more tools at the problem—but that can just add to security complexity, and open gaps in policy.

Automated attack simulations can help IT stay ahead of attackers, and break out of the constant buying cycle, by getting more from existing security controls.

•Extend/enhance red teams and penetration testers
•Reduce exposure time
•Verify that existing tools are working as expected

Join us at 11am ET on July 19th with Dan Cummins, Senior Analyst, 451 Research and Chris Webber, Director of Product Marketing, SafeBreach as they explore breach and attack simulation technology.

Computing and applications in IT have shifted over the last decade from a de-centralized to a centralized, cloud-based model. New Internet of Things applications promise to reverse that trend with an emphasis on local edge computing and analytics, and create a continuum of new aggregation points to address the unique needs of each IoT vertical application. This webinar will look at key drivers behind the re-emergence of the edge in IoT analytics and the growing demand for near-edge aggregation models to solve for application latency and cost constraints.

451 Research is your radar into the business of IT innovation. Whether you are a product manager investigating the competition, an IT decision-maker evaluating the impact of emerging technologies on your business, a service provider finding your place in an evolving industry, or a dealmaker fueling the digital economy, 451 Research gives you the inside track on your business and your markets.